The healthcare industry generates and handles vast volumes of structured and unstructured data every day, including EHR data, SDoH data, lab reports, medical imaging data, claims data, and patient communications. Payers, providers, and intermediaries – all stakeholders contribute to this growing healthcare data volume.
But here’s the real question – How much of this healthcare data is actually leveraged for meaningful insights that drive positive outcomes and value-based care?
Research shows that a staggering 50-90% of healthcare data goes untapped for analytics. According to an IDC study, healthcare data is projected to grow at a CAGR of 36% through 2025, which is faster than any other industry. Leveraging this data is an urgent priority for healthcare organizations looking to enhance clinical decision support, operational efficiency, and power AI innovation.
This is where the healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric emerge as a game-changer, enabling organizations to perform large-scale analytics and power generative AI initiatives using their healthcare data, all on a unified, scalable platform.
Challenges Due to Poor Utilization of Healthcare Data
Several challenges are born out of improper utilization of healthcare data, such as:
- Fragmented insights: Unstructured and siloed data hinder holistic decision-making. Fragmented insights impact everything from predicting patient surge to planning operational strategies to training AI models.
- Poor patient experience: Without consolidated data, organizations lack a 360-degree view of their patients, impacting patient experiences and outcomes through longer wait times, delays in claims processing, and limited personalization of services.
- Complex workflows: Difficulties in data sharing across payers and providers lead to bottlenecks and delays in outcomes, especially during prior authorizations and care transitions.
- Security and Compliance Risks: Fragile and fragmented data systems impair governance and make way for increased security and compliance breaches.
How Microsoft Fabric Data Platform Solves the Healthcare Data Challenge
Microsoft Fabric is a powerful analytics platform that unifies data engineering, data science, and business intelligence under a single umbrella. Designed with flexibility and scalability at its core, Microsoft Fabric addresses the unique complexities around healthcare data with ease.
The healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric are designed to simplify how healthcare organizations work with data by breaking down silos and enabling faster insights. The foundation of these Microsoft Fabric Healthcare Solutions is built on Medallion Architecture by leveraging Fabric’s OneLake. This multi-layer approach enables a single source of truth for organizations and improves data quality as organizations can maintain and track data lineage. Additionally, APIs and connectors in Microsoft Fabric enable smooth healthcare data integration with various cloud systems, enabling automation of the data workflows.
To learn more about Microsoft Fabric and its core components, read our latest blog: Why Microsoft Fabric Data Platform is the First Step in Building an AI-Ready Foundation
The healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric are designed to simplify how healthcare organizations work with data by breaking down silos and enabling faster insights. The foundation of these Microsoft Fabric Healthcare Solutions is built on Medallion Architecture by leveraging Fabric’s OneLake. This multi-layer approach enables a single source of truth for organizations and improves data quality as organizations can maintain and track data lineage. Additionally, APIs and connectors in Microsoft Fabric enable smooth healthcare data integration with various cloud systems, enabling automation of the data workflows.
To learn more about Microsoft Fabric and its core components, read our latest blog: Why Microsoft Fabric Data Platform is the First Step in Building an AI-Ready Foundation
Pre-Built Healthcare Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric
With pre-built industry templates and reusable data pipelines, the healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric are tailored to empower key stakeholders, including the payers and providers, through its transformative capabilities across three key areas:
1. Healthcare Data Ingestion & Standardization Capabilities
- Healthcare Data Foundations: This capability enhances FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) data processing and efficient structuring of data for machine learning and AI. It helps build an efficient clinical data pipeline and allows healthcare organizations to quickly set up a data estate.
- Azure Health Data Services – Data Export: This capability facilitates the export of FHIR data from Azure Health Data Services directly into Fabric’s OneLake. It simplifies healthcare data integration, as the data is easily imported and prepared for advanced analytics within Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake environment.
- OMOP Transformations: This capability under Microsoft Fabric’s healthcare data solutions converts raw data into the OMOP common data model to enable standardized analytics and population-level studies. It also provides notebooks to construct statistical models and correlation studies.
- DICOM Data Transformation: This capability allows ingestion, storage, and transformation of medical imaging data from X-rays, CT scans, and MRI scans. It enables the interpretation of medical images with greater accuracy and improves patient outcomes. It also boosts collaboration and R&D by facilitating exploratory analysis and large-scale radiomic studies.
- CMS Claims Data Transformations: This capability enables bringing in Medicare & Medicaid claims for downstream analysis. It helps monitor trends, utilization, and measures performance to reduce overall claim expenses. It can enhance Revenue Cycle Analysis and monitor costs and care quality effectively.
2. AI & Analytics Advancement
*These features are currently in preview mode and still being fine-tuned based on user feedback. Once released for general availability, these capabilities will help healthcare organizations unlock deeper insights and drive innovation:
- Orchestrate Multimodal AI Insights: This helps generate AI enrichments from healthcare models and APIs on demand. It provides three pre-built models for automated AI enrichment: Text Analytics for Health, MedImageInsight, and MedImageParse.
- Unstructured Clinical Notes Enrichment: This capability helps extract clinical insights from unstructured text using Azure AI Text Analytics for Health. It can then be used to gain insights and predictions to enhance patient outcomes.
- Discover and Build Cohorts: This supports natural language queries to explore multimodal data and define cohorts. These data cohorts can be used to train ML and AI models for health trend analytics, clinical trials, and quality assessments.
3. Care Coordination and Patient Outreach Enablement
- Care Management Analytics: This capability provides an extensive analytical platform to unify data, enhance patient identification, and support value-based care system. It helps optimize patient outcomes and resource allocation for quality patient care.
- Patient Outreach Analytics: This provides a configurable Power BI report that integrates critical patient data to enhance patient engagement strategies. It can also be used for patient segmentation and to prepare extensive patient lists. Organizations can assess and improve the effectiveness of various methods of outreach, like email, SMS, and patient journeys in determining appointments.
KANINI’s Success Story with Microsoft Fabric Healthcare Data Solutions
Our client, a multi-regional healthcare provider, had been struggling with their data and tools that were scattered across multiple platforms and lacked integration.
We built an end-to-end data platform by implementing Lakehouse architecture on Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake – successfully integrating data from two different EHR systems. We were able to model over 50 key metrics that helped improve outcomes – from patient throughput to scheduling efficiency.
Additionally, Microsoft Fabric’s design ensured data consistency and scalability.
Connect with us to learn more.
Ready to Move from Raw Data to Real Impact?
Healthcare Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric offer competitive pricing and capabilities that can be purchased and adopted as required. Organizations have the flexibility to invest in and scale only those features relevant to them. By integrating both structured and unstructured data processing as well as analytics into one platform, Fabric enables accurate insights, informed decision-making, and secure collaboration across payers, providers, and patients. Microsoft Fabric is also the first step in building a solid foundation for AI initiatives.
As a trusted Microsoft Partner, KANINI empowers healthcare organizations to harness the maximum potential of the Microsoft Fabric platform to address the evolving challenges in modern healthcare, including rising patient expectations, operational challenges, compliance complexities, data security concerns, the shift to value-based care, and cost pressures.
Connect with our experts to unlock the full value of the healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.
Frequently Asked Questions
Microsoft Fabric brings together data from EHRs, lab reports, claims, and more into a unified platform. It enables healthcare teams by providing pre-built pipelines and transformation tools to quickly turn complex data into actionable insights.
FHIR and OMOP models standardize diverse, often unstructured healthcare data into readable, tabular formats. This can then be leveraged for real-time analytics, data sharing and AI readiness across clinical and operational workflows.
Yes, Microsoft Fabric supports HIPAA compliance through built-in privacy, access control, audit logs, and data residency capabilities. Healthcare Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric is also compliant with HITRUST, ISO 9001, 22301, and more.
Absolutely. With low-code tools like Power BI and Copilot, even non-technical users can explore patient cohorts, filter by clinical or demographic data, and visualize patterns, without needing advanced coding skills.
Microsoft Fabric is built on enterprise-grade security. It uses OneLake for governed storage and can be integrated with Microsoft Purview for robust governance and data security. It supports data masking, lineage-tracking and aligns with industry compliance standards like HIPAA and HITRUST.
Author
Prashant Sharma
Prashant Sharma is the Data Analytics & AI Practice Lead at KANINI, with over two decades of experience in solution development and delivery. He leverages deep expertise in data analytics and GenAI to lead transformative projects, mentor agile teams, and drive data-driven innovation across industries.
